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all right crystal what's on your radar well many of you have been watching with horror as texas residents froze in their dark homes after winter storm triggered a catastrophic power failure that left millions without electricity in freezing
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cold temperatures the stories that have come out of that state are absolutely heartbreaking one little 11 year old boy went to sleep in his unheated trailer next to his brother never woke up the next day the family
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and local authorities suspect that he succumbed to hypothermia the temperature had dropped to just nine degrees a 75 year old man died in his truck after his oxygen machine stopped working ran out of supplementary tanks
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a mother and her seven-year-old daughter died of carbon monoxide poisoning after running a vehicle in the garage to try to get warm many who survived the storm are now faced with another menace massive energy bills running into
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the tens of thousands of dollars customers of a company called gritty came in for the most brutal exploitation so the company's whole model to sell consumers electricity at wholesale
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prices that means when demand is low and energy is cheap you get a good deal but as it turns out that also means when demand surges and production drops you can quickly get hit with a multi-thousand
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dollar bill before you can say the words price gouging new york times interviewed veteran scott willoughby he lives off of social security he got a 16 000 electric bill
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here's what he told the times quote my savings is gone there's nothing i can do about it but it's broken me the article goes on to interview more texans who are being hit with sudden massive energy bills that have
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completely drained their savings accounts but perhaps the most shocking thing about it was the absolute callous disregard of the market fundamentalist william hogan who's credited with designing this free market
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paradise that is the texas energy market in an interview with the times mr hogan argued that the market actually worked perfectly here the rapid losses of power more than a third of the state's available electricity production was offline at one point
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increased the risk that the entire system would collapse causing prices to rise said mr hogan a professor of global energy policy at harvard's kennedy school quote as you get closer and closer to the bare minimum
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these prices get higher and higher which is what you want now what kind of a sick ideology do you have to have to argue that destroying the lives of people like mr willoughby draining every penny from their saving
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accounts is what you want the answer of course is exactly the kind of sick ideology that has dominated this country for the past 40 years texas's experiment with aggressively
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deregulating their energy sector is just one dramatic example of the kind of blind market magical thinking and abandonment of any value except for profit maximization that has hollowed out the entire nation
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how did we get to this place well just like with gritty the core of the pitch made to average consumers is always the lore of low prices with no detailing of the steep costs that are associated with those low
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prices they tangle cheap goods and convince you to trade away every other value and priority so just think about walmart or amazon as an example these mega monopolistic retailers have gutted
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the country they've destroyed countless small businesses they turn main streets into abandoned husks and they are now waging war even on the suburban landscape what's more they suck all of the wealth out of local communities to bentonville
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arkansas or seattle washington providing an exchange only some poorly paid non-unionized exploitative jobs and the irresistible attraction of low low prices so that we can all live the american
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consumer's dream are you actually better off when your town is gutted but you can buy more cheap plastic crap at rock bottom prices or think about the minimum wage debate market fundamentalists always fear
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monger about how expensive the big macs are going to be if we dare lift the minimum wage above poverty levels it's a clever way to try to make a populist pitch for what is fundamentally a plutocrats agenda
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left unstated of course is the fact that lifting wages will give you more money in your pocket to afford that extra 17 cents for your big mac or perhaps to afford you with better food at buying options than the fast food wasteland
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or consider the debate around taxes low taxes are great till it comes time to build roads fund schools and oh i don't know maybe winterize your electric grid gritty got customers signed up with that promise of cheap energy
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but they failed to warn adequately about the potential devastating downsides and for a desperately cash-strapped nation the chance at cheaper prices holds huge appeal especially because the payoff of
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the cheap good is immediate while the horrific costs don't show up until the medium or long term so step by step americans have been persuaded to accept the plutocrats free market radicalism
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step one was to frame the american dream in terms of consumerism having the material goods associated with the middle class life step two was to strip the social safety net and scrap pensions and steady employment arrangements in favor of
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contract work and the gig economy so that middle class life was increasingly unattainable step three was to dangle the ability to fake the middle class life through credit cards and cheap crap
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hey if we bust the unions and keep wages low and deregulate so that the fda will look the other way while literal poison makes it into baby food as we covered here before maybe just maybe you'll be able to scrape together the appearance of
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affluence on a credit card charging 24 apr always left out of the pitch by the politicians paid by the bankers and corporate interests to sing this siren song is the unacceptably high cost of these low prices and then what is the
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last step in the sequence when like in texas this past week the devastating effect of this market fundamentalism comes plainly into view well step four is to blame frozen windmills or the green new deal or
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socialism to maybe head to cancun and then hope that political tribalism keeps any sort of real reckoning or course correction from ever occurring and sagar very interesting going back to the roots of
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this texas crisis by the way yeah guess who was governor when they put into place this like free market deregulation impact who was richard this was a big thing that enron wanted
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why because they were already gaming california and they wanted to game texas right and so i it was funny as i really thought about this gritty situation though and i realized that this lure that they dangle of cheap prices which are
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immediate which you can feel right away in your budget you say okay it's gonna cost less for electricity it's going to cost less for goods it's going to cost less for baby food whatever it is that has been used to draw people in and
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never ever do they lay out the consequences and the destruction that those low low prices are wreaking across our economy we're going to talk to chris smalls today at amazon their classic example of this they just
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are horrific to their labor force in service of low prices getting the delivery to you and it's destroying local retail it's destroying so the suburban landscape at this point is
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sucking all the wealth locally out of the towns and that part has a longer-term effect so it's harder for people to see and visualize in that moment no and what i kept thinking about was what literally crashed our economy in
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2008 subprime mortgages it was the same thing right predatory that's exactly what this entire thing is oh you can own a home you can own a huge home you can own three homes four homes um and yeah you don't even have to put any money down people are like what of course they're gonna take that deal yeah
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but they don't read the fine print which says oh but they can jack the rates up and you can basically lose all four at a single time and all this is going to be commoditized et cetera everybody knows the story payday lending is very much the same
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situation they're like yeah you get your money right now right oh left on set is we're going to gouge you for the rest of your life i mean so much of our economy is built upon leeching out um all these things and
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like you said we're just promising people dreams and other things in exchange for deals which look good but which can have immense consequence and yeah look my
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conservative friends love to talk about deregulation i think in some cases deregulation is great one of the fascinating things about houston though has always been it's been this very strange experiment in this which is they have no zoning laws in some ways it's
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good housing is cheap in other ways it's a weird city where you can have like a warehouse next to a house which is next to like a luxury condo and you're like what the hell is going on here so look there's a balance towards all of
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this and when you are ideologically committed towards one thing all the way in one direction then you end up in situations like this and people should be much more humble about what it means which is look i read
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the documents the texas texas leadership was warned twice about possible once in 100-year storms with a cold snap and what it could do and all they had to do was winterize their natural gas equipment which would have cost
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x millions of dollars and none of us would have been in this situation it's not a politically convenient narrative to anyone right because still requires fossil fuels but it also requires like hardening your energy grid nobody wants to do it and i think that's
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actually the bigger problem we have well and the thing that was incredible in that new york times article that was talking about these outrageous energy bills that these customers were getting like mr willoughby will be the veteran who lives on social
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security and got a 16 000 electric bill um the quote from the dude who is credited with credited with setting up this texas energy free market experiment and he's
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just like yeah this worked just the way it's supposed to right like they actually like they're fine with this because how do i see okay around the margins people like to get hurt so now as well right now this is the way it's supposed
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to work and so this is all fine and good and that just really exposes just how radical that ideology is and look we saw it here nafta's another perfect example where people like that guy who
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have that free market fundamentalist view they look at it and they say well overall gdp may have increased by a tick and so this was a this was an appropriate experiment this worked out
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perfectly this worked out exactly as we're expected now go and talk to the people who live in the towns that have been absolutely decimated i've seen their livelihoods go away who've never been able to re achieve their middle class stability
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and ask them how it goes for them but when you're just looking at these sort of like impersonal macro economic variables and you don't actually give a about the individual human beings in the way that they're going to suffer
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you end up with these horrific outcomes that's basically what we see in texas right absolutely and you saw like ted cruz be like this is wrong i'm like i had to get this way man yeah yeah indeed next on rising roger fisk rachel bovard they're here for team
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rising when rising returns
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